The Obsequious Tweet

Twitter.  What's it for?  I mean, really.


The word originally meant endless noisy birdbrained chatter, but that differs from Twitter because...er...


No, I can't see a difference. 


 OK, I know what you're going to say.  Oh, it's a great way to build a platform and promote your books yada yada yada... That's what I thought too, except with Everybody and His Auntie up on the ethernet shouting about their books all the time who's going to notice?  And what's worse, Twitter seems to be counterproductive in many ways.  If all I know about someone is they want to sell me their book I'm not enthralled, or even interested.  In fact I'm bored.  Shouting Buy Buy Buy till you're blue in the face might work on prime time tv but trust me it don't work on Twitter.


Oh, but you can follow all sorts of famous people and find out what they're really like.   I follow a few of the famous and not-so-famous-but-slightly-more-important-than-me and I admit it can be mildly diverting to find out where they buy their support hose or what they had for tea.  But some of their peccadilloes are best kept hidden, frankly.  If my favourite author is a Holocaust denier and thinks East Europeans should be repatriated it's not exactly enhancing his reputation.  Just because someone excels in their work doesn't make them a wholesome or even decent individual.


Oh, but you have to network.  What that means is sucking up big style to publishers, agents, authors or anybody who can use their influence in your favour.  It's called assmosis and it's as old as time, not a Twitter invention at all.  But there's something unsavoury about the way it is played out on Twitter for all to see, stripping all parties of their dignity.  Typical exchange:


FamousAuthor: So glad to finish pesky edits.  Time to get out of my support hose and uncork bubbly.
Asskisser: Congratulations! When will book be out?  I can't wait!
FamousAuthor:  Probably not till next year.  Sorry.
Asskisser:  Oh, please don't apologise.  You've given me a treat in store. You're the greatest writer in the world...suck..suck..

This will have to do as it's triggering my gag reflex, but you get the picture. I've seen so much of it lately it's made me wonder when these creeps get time to do any writing with their tongues so firmly jammed into so many tight crevices.


Of course it's inevitable that these feted individuals become corrupted by the attention and drunk on their power can overstep the boundaries of professional ethics.  I recently witnessed a Famous Agent post a photograph of a hand scrawled and unspell-checked letter from someone claiming to be an aspiring author.  To my jaundiced eye it looked more like an elaborate piss take, but in any case it gave her hordes of Twitter followers the opportunity to cluck such grovelling responses as:


OMG I'm so sorry you have to put up with things like that! 
With your great skill you could sell it anyway!
Can I apologise on behalf of all aspiring writers everywhere.


Not one of them questioned her motives for putting a private letter up for public scrutiny.  Some of these people have fawners, not followers.

Social Networking

I recently got an invitation to register on the latest social network Google+. Don't expect a full appraisal of it, but from what I can gather it's much like Facebook except it enables you to group your contacts so you don't have to share everything with everyone.

I joined Facebook when my son was away at university as a way of keeping in touch on an informal basis. Since then it's enabled me to make contact with relatives all over the world - one or two cousins in different continents I'd never met. I've also connected with other writers, but as far as networking goes it hasn't been much use to me.

I think Twitter is better for networking because you can follow just about anyone so it's useful for knowing what people are doing and thinking.

Do you use them, and what do you think?

Twitter

Got an email this morning. Apparently one of the people I follow on Twitter had sent me a message saying, "Read this funny blog post - it mentions you!" The message included a link to take me to said blog post. For some reason I didn't fall for it. It might have been because I barely knew this person. Lucky, really. After making enquiries it turned out this was a phishing site, the result of someone's account being hacked.

That's the trouble with Twitter. It's instant and can be exhilarating if you get swept up in some trending topic. It gives you the chance to talk to anyone anywhere. It can make you feel connected. But with every tweet you're revealing information that some can use against you. I've been spied on recently and the result wasn't pleasant. No real harm done, but it seems no sooner do we find new ways to communicate than someone finds a way to use that against us.

So if you're on Twitter, beware of prying eyes.

Wills and Kate get spliced

Well the much hyped Royal Wedding went off without a hitch. I spent a lot of the morning reading the hilarious tweets about it and some of the comments cheered me up no end. It's nice to see that people are pretty astute and don't all fall for the publicity. It seems to me, as a casual observer, that the media were the ones most excited about it. I could only stand to watch about twenty minutes of the tv coverage and most of that with the sound off because the obsequious ramblings of journalists and so-called experts was bringing on my gag reflex. I sincerely hope non-Brits don't imagine this kind of grovelling is representative of Britain. What we weren't allowed to see were the hordes of riot police keeping any demonstrations well away from the cameras.

But that's them married and good luck to them. The track record of royal marriages isn't great, but I hope theirs lasts into old age. A good marriage is the greatest gift anyone can have.

If you were on the dark side of the moon and managed to miss it, here's the livened up version.

Internet Slapstick

Why do we laugh when a man carrying a ladder turns suddenly and knocks some poor unsuspecting sod into a man hole? Or when the business man slips on a banana skin and lands ignominiously on his behind? Part of us loves to relish the humiliation of others. Of course it's not at all funny when it happens to us.

This week every writers' board I frequent has been buzzing with talk about the reaction of author Jacqueline Howett to a review of her book The Greek Seaman. I'm not going to post links because if you haven't already heard about this you must be living in a sensory deprivation chamber and if so you can easily Google her name to find it. To summarise, she was less than gracious that the reviewer pointed out spelling/grammar mistakes in her work and after an increasingly bitter row told him to F*ck Off.

Had that been the end of it nothing more need be said. But the ensuing reaction of the writing community was on a scale of Japan's recent tsunami. A flood of self-righteous condemnation, both on the blog and on writers' boards and Twitter, sent this story into the digital stratosphere. It's astonishing that one little book could create such a buzz, and for all the WRONG reasons. No doubt Ms Howett has sold a few more copies of her book as a result, but I'm not really interested in her per se. The reactions of others is far more interesting.

Why on earth were normal decent people mobbing a complete stranger like this? Does it really matter how good/bad/indifferent her book is? With the market awash with books who cares what a reviewer thinks of this one? No, this wasn't about the book. This was pure slapstick. This woman who had the temerity to put her work out there for review then reacted the way all of us would like to react to criticism and made a spectacle of herself. If we'd done it we'd be feeling awful, but this was someone else so it was alright to sneer and snigger. And all that sniggering added up to a tidal wave of indignation.

I can't help wondering how many of those doing the mobbing have even written a book, let alone published one.

Would Dickens have Tweeted?

Do you tweet? It's conventional wisdom that authors must be tireless self-promoters and get on all the social networks to establish a "platform" from which they can presumably relentlessly plug their wares to the world at large. But is it a good thing to put ourselves Out There for all and sundry to scrutinise?

I know some writers who are terminally shy and hate all that self-promotion razzmatazz. I'm a bit like that myself. Like most Scots I suffer from the Tall Poppy Syndrome - we're trained from an early age to keep the head down lest it be chopped off. So boasting and shouting about how great we are doesn't come naturally.

The trouble is of course, it comes all too naturally to some, sometimes to an obnoxious degree. Be honest, how many writers have turned you off their work by their tiresome self-importance? With Twitter and Facebook there's no mystique to the author any more. Their every bowel movement of an opinion is there for all to see, and if you don't happen to agree with their rabid political outpourings you might just feel a little alienated.

So isn't the whole exercise self-defeating? Time was when we knew nothing about the authors we read, unless some doughty reporter managed to get a scoop of an interview in one of the Sunday supplements. We could fondly imagine them as anything which suited us. Non-threatening, friendly, arty: mysterious. We didn't know where they had their legs waxed and we didn't want to know. Maybe some more of that mystery would suit us better today?

On Social Networking

I recently watched The Social Network, the story of the creation of Facebook and the subsequent law suits that inevitably result when anyone makes an obscene amount of money. It's a good film - surprisingly good, considering there are no car chases, heists or obligatory sex scenes. Just one nerd and his great idea.

I've been a member of Facebook for a few years now. Funny to think it started off as a way to connect friends at a single US college and mushroomed into a worldwide phenomenon. I joined to keep in touch while my son was away at university, but now I have reconnected with long lost relatives near and far and friends I've met on forums. I don't find it scary, but I know many of my generation view it with a jaundiced eye. Scare stories abound all the time about how your identity can be stolen. No one's ever stolen my identity to date - maybe I'm not interesting enough.

But I like the idea of social networking. I'm on Facebook and Twitter too. I like the fact that information passes virally around the world. I like feeling connected to all sorts of people all over the place. I'm grateful to Mr Zuckerberg and his like for giving us this tool to play with.

Twitter Stories

I joined Twitter a while back, only because everyone kept going on about it and as you know I always follow the herd. I wanted to know what the fuss was about. At first I confess I couldn't see the point of it - who apart from fans and stalkers cares what minor celebs get up to between gigs? And let's face it most of us aren't remotely interesting in the minutiae of our dull dreary lives. Or so I thought.

Over time it's really grown on me. I don't follow a huge number of people, about forty or so, enough to get an interesting cross section of thoughts and activities. So there's usually at least one interesting post when I visit. And if there isn't, well it's only a sentence or two so no time wasted. Unlike blogs people have to get to the point pretty sharpish. I like that. And over time you see a pattern emerging in people's posts that is more revealing of them as people than their more showy blogs and websites.

So it's taken me a while but I finally see the point of Twitter. It's a rare skill to condense your meaning into a few words - anyone who's wrestled with poetry will appreciate that. Yes, we all know about the joy of unrestrained prose and being drunk with words, but those words we're drunk on are usually more rewarding to ourselves than those we're communicating with. Mostly it's unmitigated drivel. Restraint is good. It makes us artful - every word must count. Real writers respect words and know their power; diluting them is wasteful.

So I wonder if it's possible to write a story in a Twitter post. 140 characters, including spaces and punctuation. Beginning, middle, end. You know the drill: get to it!